Like this:

I’m reading this great book about Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Jack Kerouac, and with mentions of Allen Ginsberg, about their time spent on fire lookouts in the North Cascades of the USA. It’s quite neat to read the real-life stories of these folks that are given new names in Jack Kerouac’s book The Dharma Bums – which is a most excellent read as well.

The 1950’s beat Buddhism generation were ahead of their time – beating the hippies of the 60’s and 70’s to the punch. These folks fell in love with the Diamond Sutra (aka Diamond Cutter) and carried those old copies of Goddard and Suzuki around with them at all times.

Probably the most important thing about these people, at least to me, revealed through this aforementioned work, is how in order to write poetry and books, they used real life events applied to their craft. They ate peyote, took Benzadrine and drank copious amounts of alcohol before sitting down in their chairs to write. At one point, while Jack was up there on Desolation fire lookout, he came face to face with something other than what he was expecting; Jack was hoping to come face to face with God, Buddha or some Source while isolated and alone up there on the mountain – instead he came face to face with himself.

While I don’t engage in any consumption of drugs or alcohol, I am still able to gain insight into these people’s lives. This work shows these revered poets and authors in true light: as human beings on a personal path of struggle and how some of the made it out the other end, and some of them died trying. After all, I probably wouldn’t have been able to handle such harsh criticism from Alan Watts on my book and would have drank myself into the depths of hell just as Jack did (and wrote about in Big Sur).

But in my heart of hearts, these men will remain for what they were: extraordinary because there were so ordinary. May their works live on forever.

The poet Rumi writes, “Find the real world, give it endlessly away, grow rich flinging gold to all who ask. Live at the empty heart of paradox. I’ll dance there with you – cheek to cheek.”

With That Moon Language by Hafez
Admit something;
Everyone you see, you say to them,
“Love me.”
Of course you do not do this out loud;
Otherwise,
Someone would call the cops.
Still though, think about this,
This great pull in us to connect.
Why not become the one
Who lives with a full moon in each eye
That is always saying
With that sweet moon
Language
What every other eye in this world
Is dying to
Hear.

A homie supplies an excuse to Norma Gillette, who has worked at Homeboy longer than anybody and consequently has heard it all: the homie says to her, “I have Anal Blindness.”“Anal Blindness?” she says. “Yeah, I just can’t see my ass coming to work today.”

The poet Rumi writes, “Close both eyes to see with the other eye.”

Woody Allen says, “I’m not afraid of death, I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”

Thich Naht Hahn writes that “our true home is the present moment, the miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the green earth in the present moment.”

Emily Dickenson writes, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, that sings the song without the words and never stops at all.”

“How many things have to happen to you,” Robert Frost writes, “before something occurs to you?”

“You are the sky,” as Pema Chodron would insist. “Everything else, it’s just weather.”

Mary Oliver writes, “There are things you can’t reach. But you can reach out to them, and all day long.”